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This practical field guide brings together lessons learned from past interventions in the prevention and control of cholera, and other related guidance.

The aim is to provide a quick, step-by-step guide to inform cholera outbreak interventions and ensure public health programmes that are rapid, community-based, well-tailored, and gender and diversity aware. The guidelines given here are not comprehensive – they have been designed to be used together with existing Oxfam and WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene) cluster public health guidelines.

The guidelines will enable both public health teams and programme managers to undertake necessary preparations to prevent cholera outbreaks from occurring and to respond effectively when they have occurred. They have been specifically designed to fit the cholera outbreak curve, depicting key activities in each critical phase before, during and after outbreak. They can also be adapted to suit other water- and sanitation-related outbreaks, such as Typhoid, Hepatitis E, and dysentery, as well as other WASH-related diarrhoeal outbreaks.

The guide is divided into two main parts. The first part explains how to design phased, cholera-specific public health preparedness and response programmes. The second part comprises appendices showing tools for rapid assessment and monitoring, and examples of plans that have been used during past interventions. Important aspects of different types of outbreaks – such as outbreaks in urban populations, rural dispersed populations, camp populations, and flood situations – have been flagged up.